


a wound that love had opened

by impertinency



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASOS Spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Half-Sibling Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-10 23:29:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/791421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinency/pseuds/impertinency
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a pain that stirs in his heart when he thinks of the last time they were together. Had he known then, Robb would have held onto Jon a little tighter. Would have wrapped his arms around his brother and never let go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a wound that love had opened

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com/14808.html?thread=9604568#t9604568). Title from Sonnet VII of Pablo Neruda's _Cien Sonetos de Amor_. You can read it [here](http://impertinency.tumblr.com/post/50027539658/aseaofquotes-pablo-neruda) (and do read it - it's gorgeous and pretty much epitomizes Robb and Jon's relationship for me).
> 
> Even though this is AU, major spoilers for _A Storm of Swords_ /Season 3.
> 
> UPDATE: A Chinese translation is available [ here](http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6db619070101dwaw.html) by [Clearsnow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Clearsnow/pseuds/Clearsnow)!

 

 

It takes three arrows to fell him. One in his shoulder, another in his leg, a third in his chest.

(The arrows aren’t meant for Jon, but he is the one who steps in front of them anyway, the one who uses his body as a shield as he attempts to pull Robb to safety.)

Blood seeps through his clothing, trickles down his side to stain the hands of the brother that cradles his broken body. His direwolf’s white fur is matted and blood-streaked, his teeth bared in a snarl as he races across the hall, unimpeded by the arrow jutting from his shoulder.

Jon stumbles to his feet, ignores the curl of pain that winds through his body as he reaches for his sword. He places himself between the bowmen and Robb, manages to dodge three more arrows before a fourth lands itself in his thigh. A fifth strikes his lower back, a sixth lands in his stomach. Six arrows are what bring him to his knees, but it’s a sword through the heart that kills him. 

Jon Snow dies, and the last words that leave his lips are the names of his brother and his direwolf.

 

*

 

Half of Robb’s men are killed at the Twins. The men that remain follow him as he rides for Seagard, and though they’re bloodied and injured, they clamor for revenge and justice. Robb heads for the coast, covered in blood that is not his own, and hopes that House Mallister doesn't turn out to be one more ally that’s turned their cloaks against him. 

He doesn't look back, refuses to think about the brother that should be riding at his side.

 

*

 

There’s blood on her dress. Catelyn wipes at it only to realize that there’s blood on her hands as well. She doesn’t remember how that happened, but then, she doesn’t remember much of anything right now. Her hands shake as she rinses them in a basin of water, and she purposefully makes more noise than necessary to cover the frantic pounding of her heart.

She goes in search of Robb after, finds him holed away in a room covered in blood and sweat and tears. Jon Snow’s body is on the bed before him, and Robb’s hands jerk and flutter as he tries to remove the arrows from his brother’s corpse. Jon’s direwolf lies on the floor beside the bed, red eyes closed as Robb’s wolf licks at the wound on his shoulder.

(Catelyn has no idea who went back to retrieve the boy’s body. Doesn’t remember anything other than Robb’s anguished cry, the way he was as savage as his wolf as soon as he saw Jon die, how it had taken both Dacey Mormont and the Smalljon to wrestle him from the room.)

Robb doesn’t acknowledge her presence, keeps his back turned as he plucks the arrow from Jon’s shoulder, but she can see the tremor in his hands, the way his shoulders are tense with restrained fury. 

“I asked him to come with me,” he says, hushed like a confession she’s not meant to hear. “He never would’ve died if I let him go to the Wall.”

“It wasn’t your fault. He chose to die for you.” She places a hand on his shoulder, tries not to feel stung when he jerks away from her touch. Her gaze falls on Jon’s body, skims over the dried blood in his dark curls and the ugly, garish wounds that litter his body. Her stomach churns as she stares at his face.

_He looks so much like Ned_ , she thinks. She turns away, and her voice is choked when she tells Robb to send his bones to Winterfell. _He deserves that much. Ned would have wished it so._

 

*

 

There’s a pain that stirs in his heart when he thinks of the last time they were together. Had he known then, Robb would have held onto Jon a little tighter. Would have wrapped his arms around his brother and never let go.

 

*

 

Her son doesn’t hesitate when he orders the death of every Frey and Bolton man they capture, does not spare a thought for mercy as he swings his sword through their throats without uttering the words of his father or house. The two direwolves flank him at all times, a better kingsguard than even thirty men.

Catelyn can no longer see traces of the boy Robb once was in the lines of his face. His expression is always grim, his words always terse. There’s more sorrow that surrounds him now than when he’d heard the fate of his father and brothers and sisters.

It worries her to see how fierce and angry he’s become. How little he cares for honor, how his capacity to forgive seems to have seeped from his veins the moment his brother’s blood stained the floors of Walder Frey’s hall.

 

*

 

Word of the Red Wedding spreads throughout the kingdom.

There are whispers of treachery and treason, accusations and denials of involvement, rumors about the savage butchery of the northerners and the desecration of their corpses. And there are murmurs that the King in the North now rides for vengeance against his fallen house, that he’s forsaken the honor of those before him and taken justice into his own hands.

_They say the Young Wolf turned rabid the day the Freys murdered his brother. That he turns into a wolf and rips out the throats of his enemies._

_They say he’s more wolf now than man._

 

*

 

Robb wargs into Grey Wind only once after Jon dies. He and Jon used to slip into their wolves’ skins at night, would prowl across the hills and fields and bay at the moon as it rose high in the night sky. 

But now when he lets himself slip away, it feels wrong. Ghost is different - smells like Jon, feels like Jon, _is_ Jon - and it’s too overwhelming, too much for him to endure.

_Are you lost inside your wolf, Jon? Are you still here with me?_ The questions dance on his tongue and he wants to ask, wants to know, but he doesn’t even know who would be able to give him an answer.

 

*

 

Robb has long since stopped confiding in her, but he keeps his distance from Jeyne even when they return to Riverrun.

“He talks to me less and less,” Jeyne says. Her worry is obvious as she twists a strand of hair between her fingers. “He’s changed since he came back. I don’t know how to talk to him anymore.”

Catelyn knows all too well the change in her son. She’d thought that reuniting with his wife would calm his anger, but it had only made his grief more apparent. Had only made the sad lines of his face grow deeper, made him retreat even further into himself.

“He’s in mourning,” she says. She ignores the bitterness that wells in her throat, the way her heart feels heavier than it has in months. “You must give him time to recover.”

A month has passed since the slaughter at the Twins and there’s no sign of his grief abating. It’s been a month of Robb enacting his own vengeance on his enemies, a month of his army seeking out and killing all they deem worthy of execution.

It is not merciful and it is not honorable, nor is it something Ned would have ever allowed.

(Catelyn ignores the twinge of guilt in her gut that tells her she would do the same if she had been the one to live and bury Robb’s broken body.)

 

*

 

Catelyn thinks her prayers have been answered - that the gods have seen fit to pass down some sign of reassurance - when Arya is reunited with them a week after their return to Riverrun. She takes her daughter in her arms and hugs her tight, vows never to let her out of her sight again.

Arya cries when Robb tells her of Jon. Later, after her tears have dried and her shock has passed, her voice is eerily calm when she says, “I’ll kill the men who did it. All of them.”

Catelyn’s blood runs cold when Robb’s reply holds the same promise.

_These are not my children_ , she thinks. _There is too much darkness in their hearts. These are the children of wolves and winter._

 

*

 

Robb has had trouble sleeping since the war began, but now he finds that sleep eludes him entirely. He lies awake at night and tries to remember the curve of Jon’s smile and the taste of his kiss. Tries to remember how Jon’s body felt against his, the way he’d moan when Robb carded a hand through his hair, the way he liked to bite down on Robb’s collarbone when he thrust into him.

He worries that the memories will flicker and fade from his mind. That there will come a day when he can’t remember the sound of Jon’s laugh or the way he made Robb feel utterly and completely whole. There’s a gaping hole in his heart that Robb doesn’t think can ever be mended.

 

*

 

The ghost of Jon Snow haunts her.

Catelyn sees him in the waves of Robb’s grief, in the furor of Arya’s words, in the cruelty of each enemy execution.

The boy traded his life for her son’s, and she will always be grateful for that, but she does not think his death necessitates such extremes. And while she had once dreamed of banishing him from the halls of Winterfell - had wanted to remove the evidence of Ned’s betrayal - she had never once wished for his death, never once wished true harm on him.

But he had pledged his life to his king, had sworn an oath to protect Robb’s life, to die for him if the day ever came. She cannot find fault in the way he fulfilled that oath, cannot bring herself to think ill of a boy who so willingly died for her son.

Even so, she does not understand why his ghost haunts her children so fervently. Their grief permeates the air around her, and it’s suffocating and dizzying, makes her want to reprimand Robb and Arya for grieving more for a bastard boy than the trueborn brothers who died at Winterfell.

“He was as much my brother as Bran and Rickon,” Robb tells her. Beside him, Grey Wind bares his teeth and growls. Robb calmly places a hand on Grey Wind’s back, buries the other into the fur of Ghost’s neck. The action says more than his words ever could. “Jon was my brother and I loved him. No one will tell me what I feel is wrong.”

It’s the manner in which he proclaims his affection that strikes her as strange, and it’s with a dawning sense of horror and apprehension that Catelyn finally understands.

 

*

 

She wonders how she didn’t see it before. Her son has cloaked himself in mourning the way a woman mourns a dead husband, the way a man mourns a dead wife. Robb and Jon were always too close as children, even closer as adults, but she had assumed it was nothing more than brotherly affection. 

Catelyn won’t entertain the thought of them as lovers, won’t bring more dishonor and shame upon her family. But even though she tries to forget, the knowledge pierces and burns her heart, makes her look at her son and wonder _why_.

When she confronts him, Robb grows pale and wary. “He was my other half,” is all that he says. 

“You have a wife.” She thinks of Jeyne - of poor, sweet, beautiful, _innocent_ Jeyne - and feels something shrivel and tear in the spot where her heart once lay.

“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t say more, just looks away with a hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s wearing a different sword, takes her another moment to recognize it as the one Jon used to wield.

“Oh, Robb,” she says, and her tone is mournful and questioning and distraught, conveying all the words she cannot bear to say. 

“I will not apologize for loving him,” he says. There’s a flicker of hesitation in his face, and for a moment it’s as if he’s a child again. But then it disappears, and the man before her is her king and not her son.

Catelyn buries the recriminations deep within her and steels herself against her son’s cool gaze. She won’t ask him to apologize.

(She knows he never will anyway.)

 

*

 

It snows the day Robb returns to the North. 

There are whispers across the Seven Kingdoms about his march back home, about the way he puts his enemy to the sword without fear of retribution. About the way he rides to battle with two wolves by his side, fearing nothing and no one.

Robb is no longer afraid of death. No longer fears failing his family or losing the war (because how can he fear either of those when they’ve already come to pass).

He takes back the castle that is rightfully his, finds Sansa and Bran and Rickon, rebuilds his kingdom piece by piece. His mother claims he should be proud of the victory, declares that the North will love him all the more, will adore him as their king.

But when Robb sits on his throne, Jeyne by his side and a crown of iron and bronze on his head, the victory does nothing to fill the ache the still plagues his heart.


End file.
